Charging, accounting and billing are crucial features of communication systems and services. It has to be differentiated between retail charging of subscribers and wholesale-charging of wholesale customers such as resellers, wholesale partners, MVNOs and 5G slice owners. The invention is primarily useful for wholesale charging, but may also be applicable to retail charging e.g. if a 5G slice instance is dedicated to a large customer from the automotive industry. Network providers must design tariffs for the whole range of services offered, retail and wholesale. Charging periods have been used in the field of telecommunications networks to provide differentiated pricing per charging period, such as so called time of day accounting. With the advent of next generation networks such as 5G, new network functions, layers, infrastructures and services can be realized, including the hosting of customer applications inside the network infrastructure, such as defined by ETSI MEC. The value of hosting customer applications close to the user for low latency access or for allowing the offloading of compute intensive operations to the cloud should be monetizable. Operators complain that OTT (over the top) players benefit from their large investments in network buildout without appropriately taking part in the financing. The current charging schemes do not meet the requirements of operators investing in network infrastructure that it must be possible to adequately monetize the value created by the large investments required to meet ever increasing network coverage and bandwidth demands, demands for lower latency and demands for applications hosted in mobile edge computing infrastructure of operators.